Human Family

Lou Andreas-Salomé, Raleigh Whitinger

Description

The Human Family is the first complete translation of the cycle of ten novellas that Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) wrote between 1895 and 1898. This collection contributes to the rediscovery of Andreas-Salomé’s significance as a thinker and writer, above all with regard to her literary contribution to modern feminism and the principles of women’s emancipation.

 

Born in St. Petersburg to a German diplomat and his wife, Andreas-Salomé has always been a figure of interest because of her close relationships to influential thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Sigmund Freud. Only since the mid-1980s, however, have her prose fiction and theoretical writings been reconsidered as important documents of emerging ideas and debates in twentieth-century feminism. The ten stories of The Human Family drive home her critical perspective on feminine stereotypes. They depict a wide variety of young women as they relate to men representing different degrees of enlightenment and tolerance, struggling to express a complete and independent feminine identity in the face of the confining but often seductive roles that convention and tradition impose on female potential.

 

The Human Family provides a subtle and nuanced perspective on European feminist writing from the turn of the last century by a woman writer who was intimately involved with the literary mainstream of her time and whose theoretical and literary works played a significant role in feminist debates of the period, prefiguring present-day feminist discourse on essentialism and constructivism.

Sujets

• Germán
• German
• Germany

Informations

• Publié par: Nebraska
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780803250727
• Langue: English

Extrait

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The Human Family

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european women writers series

Editorial Board

Marion Faber Swarthmore College

Alice Jardine Harvard University

Susan Kirkpatrick University of California, San Diego

Olga Ragusa Columbia University, emerita

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The Human Family Menschenkinder

Lou Andreas-Salomé translated and with an introduction by raleigh whitinger

University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London

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Originally published as Menschenkinder (Stuttgart:jgCotta’sche Buchandlung Nachfolger, 1899). Translation and introduction © 2005 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America  

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 1861–1937. [Menschenkinder. English] The human family / Lou Andreas-Salomé; translated and with an introduction by Raleigh Whitinger. p. cm.—(European women writers series) isbn13: 978-0-8032-5952-2 (cloth: alk. paper)— isbn13: 978-0-8032-1071-4 (pbk.: alk. paper) I. Whitinger, Raleigh, 1944– II. Title. III. Series. pt2601.n4m4613 2005 833'.8—dc22 2005043719

Set in Quadraat by Bob Reitz. Designed by R. W. Boeche. Printed by Edwards Brothers, Inc.

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Contents

Introduction vii

Before the Awakening 1

Unit for “Men, Internal” 21

Maidens’ Roundelay 40

One Night 61

On Their Way 76

A Reunion 93

Paradise 105

Incognito 133

A Death 152

At One, Again, with Nature 174

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introduction

The collectionThe Human Familyis the first complete translation ofMenschen- kinder, the cycle of ten novellas that Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) wrote be- tween 1895 and 1898 and published in 1899. It is intended to further recent crit- icism’s rediscovery of Andreas-Salomé’s significance as a thinker and writer, above all with regard to her literary contribution to modern feminism and the principles of women’s emancipation. It will also enhance the recognition of Andreas-Salomé’s enduring skill as a storyteller whose prose works augment her nonliterary writings on women’s issues by couching her critical perspec- tives on conventional relationships in subtly variegated form in narratives that remain compellingly readable and relevant.

Lou Salomé was born in St. Petersburg, the youngest child and only daughter of a German career diplomat stationed in that city. She grew up in the German enclave there, in a family that encouraged her in the formal and autodidactic pursuit of her studies. At seventeen she began a relationship with the Dutch theologian Hendrik Gillot—the first of what was to become a pattern of rela- tionships with an older male mentor with whom the stimulating intellectual exchange soon brought with it problematic sexual impulses. The relationship brought the young student to the brink of a nervous breakdown and proved fundamental in her decision, at age nineteen, to study theology and philosophy at the University of Zurich—German universities did not admit women until 1902. In 1882, when overwork jeopardized her health, she journeyed to Italy, where she entered into a second tempestuous relationship. This time the man in question was none other than Friedrich Nietzsche, whom she came to know through his close friend Paul Rée. The relationship was brief, lasting barely a year, but intense. The captivated Nietzsche was moved to propose marriage, resolved to preside over the philosophical indoctrination of his brilliant new

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viiiintroduction pupil/wife. Salomé’s own misgivings about such submission combined with the machinations of Rée and Nietzsche’s sister to end the affair. But the rela- tionship had a stimulating effect on the writing of both. The contact with Sa- lomé left its mark on Nietzsche’sAlso sprach Zarathustra(1882–1886;Thus Spoke Zarathustra)—and not merely in that work’s notoriously misogynist passages. In addition, the interaction with Nietzsche and Rée provided the basic plot for her first novel,Im Kampf um Gott(1885; The Struggle for God), as well as the material forFriedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken(1894; Friedrich Nietzsche as Revealed in His Works), the first major study of Nietzsche: an analysis of his life, work, and illness that contemporary reviews praised as a “psychological masterpiece” (Resch 10). In Berlin in 1887, she married Friedrich Carl Andreas, an orientalist and professor of Persian eighteen years her senior. Their union remained unconsummated throughout its forty-three years, having from the outset taken the form of a chaste child-father relationship. The marriage was not without its crises. In the early 1890s Lou, infatuated with social-democrat politician Georg Lebedour, asked for a divorce but bowed to her husband’s demand that she terminate the relationship. At this time, while working on her analyses of Ibsen’s social dramas, she also dramatized her own marital tensions to the point of pondering a suicide pact with Andreas. The frequent recurrences of her earlier ill health were likely also a result of Andreas’s affair with Marie Stephan, the couple’s housekeeper since 1901, who in 1904 bore and helped raise Andreas’s illegitimate daughter, Marie. Yet the unusual marriage stabilized and endured until Andreas’s death in 1930, enabling Lou to balance her intense artistic and intellectual activity with a tie to the everyday, bourgeois world of the domestic household. Around the time of her marriage Andreas-Salomé began to establish her- self as a theater critic, leading to ties with the German naturalist dramatists around Gerhart Hauptmann and also to another book,Henrik Ibsens Frauengestal- ten(1892; Ibsen’s Female Figures), one of the first studies to grasp the eman- cipatory thrust of Ibsen’s social dramas and an early document of Andreas- Salomé’s own position against traditional women’s roles. Starting in the mid-1890s Andreas-Salomé ventured outside her marriage into relationships that were both intellectually and sexually fulfilling, first with Friedrich Pineles, a physician, and then, from 1897 to 1901, with the considerably younger Rainer Maria Rilke. These years were also her most productive in writing fiction and theoretical essays on women’s issues of the day. The novelsRuthin 1885 andMa: Ein

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introduction

ix

Portraitof 1901 bracket the publication both of“Fenitschka.” “Eine Ausschweifung”: Zwei Erzählungen(1898;“Fenitschka.” “A Deviation”: Two Novellas) and of theMen- schenkindercycle of 1899, the latter year seeing as well the publication of her es- say “Der Mensch als Weib” (The Human Being as Woman): feminist critics still debate the degree to which the last-named work’s essentialist starting point detracts from its feminist position against the confinements of conventionally constructed femininity. Andreas-Salomé continued sporadically to write theoretical works and fic- tion through the first decade of the twentieth century—for example,Im Zwischenland: Fünf Geschichten aus dem Seelenleben halbwüchsiger Mädchen(1902; In the Land In-Between: Five Stories from the Spiritual Life of Adolescent Girls) andDie Erotik(1910; Eroticism)—until 1911, when she decided to devote her- self to the study of psychotherapy. At the age of fifty she gained permission to attend Sigmund Freud’s seminars and became his longtime colleague and friend. Though a dedicated psychotherapist for the rest of her life, she never- theless found time to write and publish again, most notably the novelDas Haus: Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts(The House: A Family Story from the End of the Previous Century) in 1919 (but written around 1900), the expressionistic dramaDer Teufel und seine Großmutter(The Devil and His Grand- mother) in 1922,Rodinka: Russische Erinnerung(Rodinka: A Russian Memoir) in 1923, and books on Rilke (1928) and Freud (1931).

Andreas-Salomé’s sequence of relationships with prominent men ensured her a fame—and often notoriety—that could never be long obscured. But recogni- tion of her significance as a thinker and writer in her own right has emerged primarily only in the last two decades. Her theoretical writings on women’s issues struck even feminists of her own day (Hedwig Dohm, for example) as “antifeminist” and “essentialist,” and critics long tended to read them as ev- idence of her privileged remove from social realities and of her subservient relationships to male masters. It was a common critical view that she merely followed or even exploited great thinkers she had known, or that she adhered to a view of women that held conservatively to their essential—and thus, by assumption, merely subjugated and supportive—difference to men. Her works of fiction, after an initial period of approval and interest, soon fell into neglect, considered to be merely fictionalized reworkings of her own experiences ex- pressing the ideas in her essays through hackneyed plot and dialogue. In the 1960s the enthusiasm and detective work of such critics as Heinz F. Pe-

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